The farmers unions affiliated with the All India Coordination Committee of Farmers Movement (AICCFM) met for 2 days at the Punjab Bhawan in New Delhi under the chairmanship of Shri Ajmer Singh Lakhowal, President Bhartiya Kissan Union, Punjab. During this meeting, the farmers leaders from 12 farmers unions intensely discussed the current burning issues in Indian agriculture which included, the Land Acquisition Act Ordinance, NDA government U-Turn in the WTO, the recent report of the Shanta Kumar High Level Committee for restructuring FCI, and others. The meeting started with a 2 minutes silence to mourn suicide by hundreds of farmers during the current NDA government regime. The farmers suicide in India are continuing despite many promises by the Narendra Modi before the election that he would work for the Indian farmers. However after becoming Prime Minister, he expressed no concern for agrarian crisis and continuing farmers suicides. During NDA Government since May 2014, more than 7000 farmers have committed suicide.

During this 2 days meeting, farmers leaders focussed on some key issues which are of great concern and they made the following demands to the NDA government to express their frustration with this government agrarian policies. These are:

1.Withdraw Land Ordinance (Dec 2014): Farmers Reject the Ordinance to Amend the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act 2013, promulgated on 30 December 2014. This Ordinance completely reversed all pro-farmers provisions of this Act, which was achieved after a long struggle since 1894. The present Ordinance brought the Land Acquisition Act back to the 1894 level, rather worse than that. If it gets passed in the Parliament, it will be a completely Pro-Industry and an Anti Farmer Act. The AICCFM farmers demanded to withdraw this Ordinance and effectively implement the 2013 Act on Land Acquisition.

2.Provide Remunerative Price for Farmers Produce and Implement C2+50: Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP), in its manifesto (2014) announced to provide remunerative price for farmers produce and to implement Swaminathan Report’s (2005) recommendation to provide MSP based on Cost of production (C2) plus 50% as premium as the procurement price for 23 crops announced every year. Despite coming into power for more than 240 days, NDA government has made No attempt to implement Swaminathan report and no substantial increase was made in the MSP announced in 2014. We demand from the NDA government to fulfil its commitment as announced in its manifesto and provide remunerative price for farmers produce.

3.Farmers Reject Shanta Kumar High Level Committee Report and Recommendation on Restructuring FCI: Farmers organisations present at the meeting were quite outraged at the Anti-Farmers and Anti Food Security recommendations of the High Level Committee (HCL) on restructuring of Food Corporation of India (FCI). BJP again made a U-turn on its promise made in the manifesto which favoured universal food security. But the recommendations of HCL completely revered this position. It says FCI to step out of procurement operations as well as to dilute the National Food Security Act (NFSA) to reduce its coverage from present 67% to 40% which would be disastrous not only for the livelihood of millions of farmers but will affect food security of the millions of India’s landless, poor and destitutes. And in order to finish the MSP system, this committee recommends bringing in the cash transfer in the food security programme.

4.Write off all farm loans: Today the increasing farmers suicide indicate that Indian farmers are still under huge loan burden from institutional sources and private moneylenders. Farmers leaders demanded that the NDA government must write off all institutional loans of farmers. Government must also instruct public Banks and Cooperatives banks to give fresh loans to farmers at 0% interest.

5.Institute Government Policy to compensate loss due to Natural Calamity: Farmers leaders demanded that the NDA government bring in a Union Policy to compensate farmers for the crop loss due to natural calamity. There should be a clear-cut provision for irrigated and non-irrigated farmers for compensation. The Government must also institute an Emergency Fund to provide compensation to farmers on an urgent basis in case of crop loss due to natural calamities, like floods, heavy rains and drought.

6.No Trade Liberalization in Agriculture: The NDA government Must not allow any trade liberalization in agricultural goods through WTO or FTAs. Due to the huge loss of Indian farmers because of subsidised imports of agricultural goods from developed countries, farmers demand from Indian government to move a proposal in the WTO to remove Agreement on Agriculture (AoA). Farmers also demanded that agriculture related provisions from all FTAs negotiated by the Indian government must be dropped.

7.Institute Farmers Pay Commission: Farmers demanded from the NDA government to institute a Farmers Minimum Income Guarantee Commission to provide income support to farmers. Through this commission, government must ensure income to farmers which is equal to the salary of a 4th Grade government employees to help them live a dignified life.

8.NO GMOs: The Farmers unions like to remind the NDA government to fulfil their promise made in their manifesto not to allow field trials, commercialisation or import of any Genetically Engineered seeds or crops or trees.

9.Pay Arrears to Sugarcane Farmers: The sugarcane farmers have not received their arrears for last two years. The farmers leaders demanded that instead of forcing sugar industries to pay to farmers, the government instead pay all arrears due to sugarcane farmers immediately and collect the same from the industries.

The farmers’ leaders are completely dissatisfied with the way the present NDA government is dealing with the agrarian issues. All the achievements made in last several decades in the interest of the Indian farmers have been undone in last 240 days of NDA government. Therefore all the farmer unions associated with All India Coordination Committee of Farmers’ Movements decided to ORGANISE A MASSIVE RALLY AND DEMOSTRATION ON WEDNESDAY, 18th March 2015 at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi. One Lakh farmers from all over India will converge in Delhi to put pressure on the government to accept their demands.

Friday, January 16, 2015

In the past year, LVC
India built solidarity through three knowledge exchanges with our comrades from
the Landless Workers Movement (MST),
in Brazil. This came as a beneficial follow-up to our work in 2013 (see
story here about the trip to Bihar shared with
Karnataka Farmers).

Aditi and Laura (Spanish translators), Pardal, and Murgamma

In March, we
hosted Adalberto “Pardal” Martins for ten days traveling throughout Andhra
Pradesh, Telengana, and Karnataka. Pardal is a long-time member of MST, and has
contributed in many areas, including the organization of production and
cooperatives, agroecology, and political training. His visit occurred at the
timely juncture of the political division of Andhra Pradesh into two states –
Andhra and Telengana. Telengana was born of a historical struggle for land
against feudal landlords, one of many commonalities with the narrative of the
Landless Workers Movement of Brazil.

The conflict
over land and the potential of capitalists' vested interests to dominate in the
political vacuum in Telengana was a hot debate, and as Pardal met with
pastoralists, adivasis (indigenous peoples), and small and marginal farmers who
are members of Via Campesina ally Food Sovereignty Alliance, he asked them a
provocative question - “Why don’t you just take them? The lands, why don’t you
just occupy them and take them?”

“We will seize
the lands, if we don’t get justice!” responds a young pastoral activist, whose
grandparents fought in the 1942 armed rebellion against the Nizam. “Today the
Telengana political leaders speak of massive capital investment as a positive
future, but as shepherds our struggle is for our common lands and resources,
not the same path of capitalist growth.”

“Though rivers
flow through our lands, we get none of the water,” adds an Adivasi (indigenous)
activist. “We are denied rights to our forests and resources. Whether there is
one new state or one million new states, we just want autonomy over the natural
resources and right to protect the forest. Our struggle is not just for our
land but for the Mother Earth and the humanity of the world.”

"Occupy, Resist, Produce!"

Most visitors
would ask the activists why they don’t they seek legal forms of redress, or
take to the streets with banners, or invoke UN Conventions in order to put
forward a strong voice in the new development of their state. But Pardal goes
directly to direct action: occupy, resist, produce. This is a method that he
has seen tried and tested in his home country of Brasil. He has been a member
of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) or the Landless
Workers’ Movement for over twenty years. MST is a movement which organizes
peasant families to occupy unproductive and private lands which fail to meet
their social purpose, as legally provided for in the constitution. Since MST
was formed, 30 years ago, 420,000 families across 24 states of Brasil who have
won land through the struggle and have organized into cooperatives.

But despite the
differences in the scale of the organizations and their contexts, Pardal can’t
find anything but commonalities: “It amazes me how common our struggle is, how
common our enemies are, how common our vision is. These are all struggles for
food sovereignty – be they of landless farmers in Brazil or by dalit (so-called
“untouchable” castes), adivasi, farmer, and pastoral sanghams in India.”

This is Day
One. By Day Ten, Pardal finds himself even more convinced. In the nine days
between he met KRRS activists near Channapatna, Karnataka who have been
fighting against the granite mafia for 30 years. On an early morning visit to
see milk collection among members of a dairy cooperative in Madanapalli, he
addressed their first question, “What’s the status of the Indian cows Brasil
has done research about?” After a tour of the production houses of Dharani
Cooperative, based at Timbaktu Collective and owned by 1800 farmers,
certification processes were compared and debated. He also contributed to an
exchange of the status of GMOs in Brazil and India at Economics of Happiness
conference.

In November 2013,
Kannaiyan Subramaniam, a farmer activist from Tamil Nadu, had the opportunity
to continue the conversation with MST while visiting Sao Paolo. He went to the Acampamento
Serrana (Serrana Camp), near a small town called Ribeirão Preto. The land was
occupied when a sugar factory went bankrupt. The Camp Kannaiyan visited is 1817
hectares, occupied by 350 families. It has been occupied 8 times, and each time
with forced evictions, following which they regroup and return with a new
strategy for occupation. It is still in an insecure state.

Camp in Ribeirão Preto region

Kannaiyan
observed the differences between Brazil and India: “Throughout Brazilian history there was always
land concentration, monoculture, plantation, high technology and international-capital
intensive agriculture. Unlike in India, in Brazil agriculture has been
developed without people but with capital and technology (machines). Banks + media
+ international finance + technology + machines + government is the equation
for agriculture in Brazil. A huge amount of people were evicted from the land
and migrated to big cities. Few people stay in the countryside, yet those who
live in the cities also don’t have quality of life.”

India has a
very strong history of peasant-based farming and high productivity in
peasant-controlled farms, though with such a huge population land holdings can
be very small and are rarely held by women and those outside of the traditional
farmer castes. In some cases, in the MST occupied places, the people aren’t
traditionally farmers – their family have been expulsed from the countryside
generations ago. They have fertile lands but aren’t meeting their maximum
production. An exchange programs for them to learn about farming in India could
definitely help the MST settlements to improve their production, Kannaiyan
suggests. But there’s a lot for Indians to learn there too:

Kannaiayan (Left) interviews MST Activists

“MST is a very
strong movement with a strong sense of training. Training creates a very strong
cadre and leader base for MST, and involves youths, which are largely missing
in leadership structure in Indian movements. There are hundreds of thousands of
ideologically and practically committed people. This is what really impressed
me. They are using nonviolent struggle, in every level of debate. They are
committed for a total systemic change.”

In his visitas Kannaiyan
was also able to visit another settlement, Maria Lago, which had 600 families
on 1,700 acres, Smack in the middle of a “sea of sugar cane monoculture”. This
settlement has met legal peace despite police conflict in 2004 and 2005, and is
now is producing agricultural products of agrarian reform. Kannaiyan also visited the Escola Nacional Florestan
Fernandes, and you can find his analysis of his visit here.

Alex and Sabina in Kerala

A final linkage
with MST occurred in October in Kerala, when Alex Yoshinori Kawakami spent a
few days exchanging with youth activist Sabina Yasmin after an international
program on agroecology hosted by a team of international NGOs and Indian NGOs. Sabina Yasmin, activist from the Bangladesh
Kishani Federation (largely a landless peoples’ movement) came to India for a
month of technical training, language immersion, and political exchanges. Sabina and Alex toured some of the
agroecological farms of Kerala, observing first hand the negative impacts of
switching from local seeds to hybrid seeds in adverse weather, the
possibilities for small-scale mechanization, and the agricultural realities of
Kerala. Though just for a few short days, exchanges such as these bring immense richness to the struggle for food
sovereignty.

In 2015, LVC
South Asia plans to build solid pathways between MST and Indian farmers
movements – there is much to be shared between us. Methods for participatory
training and agroecology are the need of the hour as we launch our first agroecology
school at Amritha Bhoomi in Karnataka. Indian expertise in small-scale yet
productive agriculture (seen through methods such as Zero Budget Natural
Farming) along with Indian traditional medicine and Indian theories of
nonviolence are of interest to MST. We intend to exchange delegation of farmers
from South Asia to MST to implement this program, and look forward to a fertile
future.

HASTA LA
VICTORIA!

FIGHT
UNTIL VICTORY!

GLOBALIZEMOS
LA LUCHA!; GLOBALIZEMOS
ESPERANZA!

GLOBALIZE THE
STRUGGLE; GLOBALIZE HOPE!

Sabina and Alex, accompanied by their Indian hosts out side of Kothamangalam, Kerala, walk home from a field visit.